Working Papers:

Abstract: How does the size of a legislature affect the competitiveness of its districts' elections? This paper theoretically develops and empirically tests three hypotheses concerning the effect of legislative chamber size on electoral competition and partisan gerrymandering. First, in swing states, legislature size has a negative effect on the fraction of districts that are electorally competitive; the intuition here is that smaller districts are more politically homogenous and thus less competitive. Second, in those few states that are extremely Democratic (e.g., New York) or extremely Republican (e.g., Alabama), legislature size has a single-peaked relationship with electoral competitiveness: Moderate-sized legislative chambers produce the most competitive districts. Finally, because political gerrymanderers often seek to manipulate electorally vulnerable districts, a decline in competitive districts should cause a decrease in partisan gerrymandering. Therefore, among swing states, larger legislative chambers should exhibit less gerrymandering than smaller chambers.
To empirically test these three arguments, I first present data from state legislative election results during 1992-2002. I then conduct automated, repeated simulations of state legislature and Congressional districting across several states. These simulations allow us to isolate the effect of legislature size on electoral competitiveness, thus removing confounding factors such as gerrymandering, candidate quality, and incumbency advantage. Finally, in order to measure the extent of gerrymandering in each legislative chamber, I compare real-life districting plans against the simulated districting plans. By comparing these two sets of plans, I estimate the extent to which gerrymanderers politically manipulated legislative districts in the 2002 redistricting cycle.

Abstract:
This paper presents a new method of estimating the ideal points of US federal
agencies using the campaign contributions of bureaucrats employed by each agency. Ideal points
are calculated by examining the Common Space DW-NOMINATE scores of incumbent federal
politicians who receive campaign contributions from each agency's bureaucratic personnel.
These ideal point estimates exhibit face validity under tests of some basic hypotheses about the
partisan control of bureaucratic agencies. The substantive contribution of this paper is to show
that the most right-wing agencies under a Republican administration often become the most leftwing
agencies under a Democratic presidency. That is, agency ideal points under a Republican
president exhibit a negative correlation with agency ideal points under a Democratic
administration.